ABSTRACT

Amidst the unevenness and unpredictability of change in the Asia-Pacific region, women's lives are being transformed. This volume takes up the challenge of exploring the ways in which women are active players, collaborators, participants, leaders and resistors in the politics of change in the region. The editors focus attention on the politics of gender as a mobilizing centre for identities, and the ways in which individualized identity politics may be linked to larger collective emancipatory projects based on shared interests, practical needs, or common threats. Collectively, the chapters illustrate the complexity of women's strategies, the diversity of sites for action, and the flexibility of their alliances as they carve out niches for themselves in what are still largely patriarchal worlds. This book will be of vital interest to scholars in a range of subjects, including gender studies, human geography, women's studies, Asian studies, sociology and anthropology.

chapter 2|24 pages

Nine months: women’s agency and the pregnant body in L I LY P H UA AND BREN DA S . A . YEOH

Women’s agency and the pregnant body in Singapore

chapter 4|18 pages

The politics of resistance: working-class women in rural R I TA S . GALLIN

Working-class women in rural Taiwan

chapter 5|20 pages

Negotiating land and livelihood

Agency and identities in Indonesia’s transmigration programme

chapter 7|17 pages

Resisting history: Indonesian labour activism in the 1990s and the ‘Marsinah’ case G. G. WEIX

Indonesian labour activism in the 1990s and the ‘Marsinah’ case

chapter 8|19 pages

Contradictory identities and political choices

‘Women in Agriculture’ in Australia

chapter 10|24 pages

‘Asia’ in everyday life

Dealing with difference in contemporary Japan

chapter 11|18 pages

Sites of transnational activism

Filipino non-government organisations in Hong Kong